The Building Code of Australia

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In 1980, the Local Government Ministerial Council agreed to the formation of the Australian Building Regulations Coordinating Council (AUBRCC) to supersede ISCUBR. AUBRCC’s main task was to continue to develop the AMUBC, which led to the production of the first edition of the Building Code of Australia (BCA) in 1988. The BCA was further refined and a new edition was released in 1990. This edition of the BCA was progressively adopted by States and Territories during the early 1990s.

In 1991, the Building Regulation Review Task Force recommended to COAG the establishment of a body to achieve far-reaching national reform. An Inter-government Agreement was signed in April 1994 to establish the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB). One of the first tasks of the ABCB was to convert the BCA into a more fully performance-based document.

The ABCB released the performance-based BCA (BCA96) in October 1996. BCA96 was adopted by the Commonwealth and most states and territories on 1 July 1997, with the remainder adopting it by early 1998.

In 2003 a decision was taken to move to an annual amendment cycle with a date of operation from 1 May each year. From 2004, the BCA moved from BCA96 to become BCA 2004, BCA 2005 in 2005 and so on.